Glimpses  of Sanctuary
by Japanese and Chocolate
Summary: Drabbles written in class. Glimpses from the perspectives of Sanctuary characters. AU, canon, angst, humor...
1. Weak Link

Title: Weak Links

Author: Japanese and Chocolate

Summary: Prompt - Carabina. Helen's connections to the world. Pre-Haunted.

Helen had for so long been above it all. As her culture changed into something unrecognisable, her friends died, she remained timeless. Isolated. Connected to the world by so few. With Ashley gone, the solid ground beneath her crumbling, she relied upon those connections more than ever. Still, these ties strained and snapped. Only one could be relied upon, one that joined all others together, making single weak threads into a rope to keep her from falling.

Ironically, this person was the most unreliable dangerous and weak among her acquaintances. The one who would drop her if given a choice.

John.


	2. Solitary

Title: Solitary

Author: Japanese and Chocolate

Summary: Prompt - padded cell. The aftermath of John's capture. Post Haunted. AU.

White. White. White.

He would close his eyes if only to escape the monotony of the pure, blinding white walls. But images behind his eyes haunted him even more. So he continued to stare at the white.

It was quite unexpected. The three of them surrounded him, and with a sharp pain in his shoulder, he was gone. He awoke thinking he was in a cloud. It was so soft. White and pure. Heaven, with his dark angel leaning over him. As the drugs cleared from his system he was able to take in her lab coat, the locked door, the regret in her eyes. He was not dead, not free of his torment.

He was still slave to the creature, but not for much longer.


	3. Till the End

Title: 'Till the End

Author: Japanese and Chocolate

Summary: Prompt – a national flag. Helen takes a flight.

Helen always got a jolt of excitement when boarding an international flight. More like a 16 year old than a 160 year old. No matter if business, pleasure or gruesome bodies awaited her when she landed, she always found it an interesting experience.

It was possibly because flying to another country simply wasn't possible in her youth. To travel such distances required a long arduous journey by sea. She glanced down at her passport whil preparing to board and frowned. "American Citizen". It was true that she had spent more time abroad, or in her Sanctuary in Old City, than in England, but to see it printed on her passport was annoying.

"Would you like some coffee?" The overly happy stewardess asked.

"Tea will be fine thank you."

She would always be British.


	4. Flinch

**Title: **Flinch

**Character/Pairing:** Helen/John

**Summary:** She promised herself she wouldn't…

**Warnings:** None that I can think of. Series is not mine, though how I wish it were.

She had to be fearless, for Ashley. All her daughter knew was that a ghoul had intruded into their home, nothing that hadn't happened before. She didn't know who he was, how dangerous he was, or why he was there. In truth, it made him more dangerous, it meant he had truly been engulfed by his madness, and he wanted her blood either way, heedless to the consequences to their daughter.

"I knew him well…" he had returned. And despite the hope he had simply taken Ashley for a joy-ride, she was no longer with him. "Something about the worst of the worst…" she turned to head for the SHU, to find her daughter, before his words cut her off. "I'll just get there first." Though rational in themselves, they were anything but when in context.

For the first time since they arrived they were directly facing each other for more than a few seconds. Able to make eye contact. She was able to see that the man she had known a century ago was long gone. Still as he approached her she couldn't help but remember his laughing face, his kind hands. His voice, raised by his madness, words dissolved into half-constructed insults and demands belonging to a Shakespearian play he encroached further.

Looking into his eyes once again, seeing his every intent, she did the one thing she had promised herself she would not do.

She flinched


	5. Repetition

**Title:** Repetition

**Characters/Pairing: **Bigfoot, Helen

**Summary:** She pushed herself too hard, especially after…

**Warnings:** Nil (Wow, I didn't feel the need to fill this in for no reason. Wait, oh)

Big, well muscled hands carefully arranged items on the platter before him. The Big Guy was known as a valuable fighter and fierce protector among the Sanctuary's staff and residents. It was also well known that he doted on Helen. Bringing her food when she forgot to eat, reminding her to sleep when she went days without it.

Lately, it had become much more common, her ventures to the limits of what her body could tolerate. The repetition of making tea had become part of a much larger cycle.

She would punish herself with exhaustion and hunger until her body could take no more. When she finally did collapse, he would carry her to her room and gently lay her on her bed. He would leave to fret and make tea, because she wouldn't rest for long.


	6. Memento

**Title:** Memento

**Characters/Pairing:** Helen, Ashley

**Summary:** Prompt – glossy. These were her mementos.

**Warnings:** A bit sad.

Each small item within the box was handled with care. Like a sacred artefact. To the woman who held them, they were beyond sacred. They were the only things that mattered in her life.

At the same time, each memento bound and distanced her from reality. While she could look at these and find the strength to carry on, each glimpse into the past drew her deeper and deeper into a world of her imaginings.

Into a world where the blonde angel smiling out at her from the photographs still existed.


	7. Lightning

**Title:** Lightning

**Characters/Pairing: **John/Helen

**Summary:** Each time she had the power to destroy him, but never struck so close.

She was flickering and distant, bright and electrifying, dangerous and beautiful.

Her presence resulted in pure sensory overload. She was all he could hear, all he could see, she shook him to his very core. When she left, her afterimage was imprinted on the back of his eyelids and her voice echoed musically through his ear. Sweet and high like the melody of the violin, or the after effect of thunder.

Her brief interactions with him, moments when she tore through his life, were by no means consistent, but inevitable and unavoidable nonetheless. Each time she had the power to destroy him, but never struck so close.

Once he believed he knew her, possessed her even. But she was not something to be controlled. He only dared admire from afar.


	8. Kraken

**Title:** Kraken

**Characters/Pairing:** Will, Helen

**Summary:** "Kraken? Please, that's a complete myth."

The site before him was one of the most awe-inspiring he had seen of his time working in the Sanctuary. The cooperative efforts of six Sanctuaries had gone into trapping the creature before him: a kraken.

Almost a year ago they had detected anomalies in the ocean currents and sea floor of the region. An entire underwater mountain had disappeared with no evidence of any seismic activity. Then, weeks later, ships began to sink or disappear. The survey team reported that, indeed, a previously undiscovered Kraken did exist.

Because of its sheer size, they could not kill it as protocol demanded and risk its decay polluting the area's water. Their only hope had been to lure the creature into an area of the ocean where their massive nets could seize it.

He turned to the woman beside him, a rare smirk on his face. "'Complete myth', huh?"


	9. Camping

**Title:** Camping

**Characters/Pairing:** Will

**Summary:** Will has to go outside his comfort zone.

One blessing of joining both the Agency, and the police force, was that his job was based in an entirely urban environment. He may have been ridiculed or ignored, but he remained in his comfort zone. When he began working at the Sanctuary, pushing the boundaries of science and reality, apprentice to the master of forward thinking herself, he had expected some level of unorthodox cases. Camping had never crossed his mind.

Then he was in a small tent that had seen better days, only a meter away from the tent housing the two Magnus women. But, he would never be able to hear them over the pounding rain of the South American rainforest.

The next time had been even worse, he jumped at every sound and every movement. Because the last time he had been camping, he woke the next day with a dead mother.


	10. Serious Business

**Name:** Sarbear12456/Japanese and Chocolate

**Fandom:** Sanctuary

**Story Title:** Serious Business

**Character/Relationships**: Ashley

**Rating:** PG

**Warnings:** nil

Ashley swaggered into the bar full of lowlifes like she was better than every single one of them combined. She couldn't help it if it was true. She sauntered to the bar, expertly avoiding dubious substances spilled on the floor. There a man, not unhandsome, was perched on a bar stool drinking casually.

"You got what I need?" She demanded without preamble, meaning business in her tight Jacket and bulky biker boots. And not to mention the long, leather clad legs.

"Now what's a pretty thing like you doing in a place like this?"

She couldn't help it. She blushed.


	11. Latet Veritas

James leaned against the cold stone pillar, unable to support his form, no matter how frail it had suddenly become. He well and truly looked, and felt, his age. Nonetheless, the people gathered around him, shocked at his sudden degeneration into old age. It was, for him, something he had expected for some time.

He looked at Nikola. He was not unsurprised by his concern, but unsettled by it. Because the part vampire had put on the persona of arrogance and heartlessness so well, James sometimes forgot he was part human also.

John was harder to look at. He truly had cared, just as James knew he did, and that made it hurt more. Despite this, Jack the Ripper had torn the Five apart, and John was at fault.

He could look at Helen. She was painfully beautiful, even with tears streaming down her cheeks, and sadness of decades etched onto her face. She had no doubt expected them all to return triumphant. She was the one person he would miss.

When he had imagined his death, many years ago, he had thought of himself, curled on a bed that no longer had Helen in it, because he would never dare pain her by dying whilst she was still alive to live with the pain of losing such a close friend-and-nothing-more.

But breathing his final breaths, white streaks in his vision from air deprivation, he wouldn't have changed a thing.


	12. New Year's Resolution

**Title:** New Year's Resolution

**Rating:** Teen

**Character(s):** Helen

It was a tradition Helen Magnus had long ago learnt to adore. Each of her numerous personal journals, cataloguing one year of her life, began with a single simple entry. A New Year's resolution. They ranged from serious to absurd, simple to complex designs on how to live her life. Some such entries had been 'Learn Japanese' (which she was now able to speak fluently), 'Finish the construction of the Mumbai Sanctuary' (completed well before the end of the year) or 'Teach Ashley piano' (one of the few that had not been a success).

Earlier in her life, when she had first started the tradition, her entries were, repeatedly, based on convincing others of her intended lifestyle as a spinster, or Doctor. She also remembered that, the year that John disappeared, she impulsively wrote 'Forget John Druitt', which was hastily crossed out because it seemed to be an insurmountable task. This year, her New Year's resolution was rather unimaginative, being the same as the year previously. Despite its deceptive simplicity, the words on the page before her carried a world of unseen meaning.

'Don't die.'

She found writing her goals down was the first step to achieving them.


	13. Rebelliousness

**Prompt: Rebelliousness**

Yes, teenagers went through a rebellious stage. Or at least, _now_ teenagers went through a rebellious stage. Helen Magnus recalled no such time in her life where she defied her father simply for the thrill of defying her father, nor was it commonly acknowledged that teenagers were capable of independent thought let alone independent action. She supposed it was the difference in the time periods, what was once discipline was now child abuse (though neither she nor her father subscribed to such a vulgar way of thinking). But not until now had she truly understood the consensus amongst long suffering parents of the twentieth century.

Teenagers went through a rebellious stage.

_Ashley_ was going through a rebellious stage.

It had started with the occasional skipping of a classes, which Helen dealt with properly. Or so she had thought. It had continued, with much more secrecy and finesse. It was followed by sneaking off the grounds to go to parties she had been forbidden to attend (the fact that had her succumb to Henry's proposed security measures) and, of all things, going off solo to track abnormals in the middle of the night.

Helen stitched the long gash in Ashley's forehead as the young woman sulked.

Helen _hated_ rebellious stages.


	14. Remembering

She'd walk the halls of her Sanctuary and remember, even though she wasn't supposed to. She'd get a rush of euphoria, remembering all the good times, the breakthrough, the friends she had made, the people she had saved. And then she remembered the rest. The funerals, the smothering black, the betrayal, the pain. Each moment had its reciprocal, she could remember learning to fly, with Amelia, her thoughts flowed to the newspaper article that told her she was gone. Helen suspected where she went, but could never follow. She'd remember that carriage ride away from Twelfth Night, scandalously close, giggling on a different kind of high. Then she'd remember the awful manner in which their engagement had ended.

It was like her own drug, up and down and up. It was like the stash that James swore he didn't have. But he took them to forget. Helen remembered.


	15. Shortcomings of a Brilliant Mind

**Name:** sarbear12456

**Story Title:** Shortcomings of a Brilliant Mind

**Rating:** PG

**Warnings:** nil

He'd always had a wonderful mind. Mathematical problems were deconstructed in seconds, the subtleties and layers of the art laid bare before his eyes. As he was appreciated more, he needed their praise and worship more until it was like a drug. He spent so long, too long, riding the high before he realized his mistake. He was now so entangled in impossible puzzles and mazes and the beauty of a simple solution was lost to him. He'd taken a drug as substitute for sunlight, and now he was deprived of both, left with only a cold and cloudy day.


End file.
